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I was born in 1941 at a place called Cambuslang, about five miles from Glasgow, wrote Bill Ferguson. It was supposed to be the biggest village in Scotland.
The housing consisted of mainly tenement buildings, where people lived on top of one another, but as a community there was none better. Those people would give you anything; they lived for the day in those times.
You would often see many families going into the pawn shops with their husbands' suits, on a Monday morning just to get a few quid to feed the kids, and then on Friday (pay day) the suits were collected for a few shillings more than the pawn shop gave you.
This was life in those days and it was a happy life.
My family home in Cambuslang consisted of two rooms: one was the living room, the kitchen, the bath room and the bedroom; the other room was a bedroom.
Mum & Dad slept in the first room and the four of us kids slept in the other room. By the way when I said bathroom, I meant a tin bath. But with all this, it was a happy home.
As money was quite scarce in those days we often had to go to neighbours and ask to borrow a cup of sugar, and they would never refuse. There was one such neighbour I remember, she said, "Oh I don't have any, but ten minutes later she knocked on the door with half a cup of sugar. She had borrowed a cup of sugar from one of her friends and gave us half of it.
Now if this is not community spirit, what is? One memory I will never forget as long as I live was when I was about 10 or 11: there was a girl in my class at school who I had the hots for, but she did not feel the same about me.
Anyway, I was walking home from school one day and I had the good fortune to catch up with her. I was chatting away and getting on well and she seemed to be enjoying my company, so I thought great, maybe there is a chance.
We met up with a couple of her friends and one of them said something which made me snigger. Wait for it, the biggest bubble I ever saw came out my nose. She did not want to know after that. I wonder why?
Cambuslang has changed a lot since those days.
Bill Ferguson, Berkshire, 2002
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